AJ Dunn Reads

  The Little Friend By Donna Tartt When she was a baby, Harriet Dufrenes's older brother Robin was murdered. Since then Harriet and her sister Allison have lived a mostly idyllic life in their small town in Mississippi. Sure, their mother Charlotte sleeps most of her days away, but Harriet has her Grandmother Edith and a host of great-aunts who live nearby. She fills her days spending time with them and playing with her friend Hely. But Robin's ghost lingers and no one will tell Harriet anything about the day he was murdered, right in their own yard. Then one day someone lets it slip that a town hoodlum, named Danny Ratliff who comes from a family of bad seeds and who was Robin's age, might be the killer. Harriet searches for a way to get even with him. When she finally lands on a plan it all goes awry when Harriet does something that she can't take back and finds out that her suspicions were wrong. The Little Friend was an exciting read, with the feeling of Ordinary G...

  Those Bones Are Not My Child By Toni Cade Bambara Zala and her estranged husband Spence investigate the disappearance of their son Sonny amidst the 1980s black child and adult disappearances and killings in Atlanta, a city that touts itself as "too busy to hate." With little help from law enforcement which wants to blame the parents and/or the child, Zala and Spence form committees and task forces with the goal of uncovering the corruption they believe is responsible for Sonny's disappearance. The novel displays a city under siege, with Zala as a somewhat single woman trying to care for three children while going to school and working to make a better life for them as they live on the fringes of a society enjoying an economic book.  Political, racial, and class tensions are highlighted in this novel. Sonny's family (unable to just set aside their lives in order to find him because if they did they would starve) after looking for help in all of the places one should ...

  The Ancient Child By N. Scott Momaday Grey, a 19-year-old girl destined to become a medicine woman contacts Locke Setman (Set), an artist in his 40s, after his grandmother dies, telling him that she is giving him the medicine left to him by his grandmother. Set, a famous artist, attends his grandmother's funeral and meets those who lived with her and surrounded her before returning to his artist life. Set had been adopted when he was young, and finds out his birth father has died. He returns to the Kiowa on an inner journey to live with Grey in a hogan where he tries to heal and falls in love with her. Interspersed with this narrative are the boy who turns into a bear myth, Grey's fantasies about Billy the Kid, and other characters who give the story its color. Like Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, The Ancient Child is about a man who needs to go outside of his regular life and return to his roots, his ancestral traditions, to reconnect with the person he is supposed to be....

  Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov   Lolita is about Humbert Humbert's obsession and descent into a mad love for a twelve-year-old girl. Lolita (Dolores Haze) lived with her mother when Humbert rented a room in their home where he met the girl and his obsession began. He married Dolores's mother Charlotte in order to be close to her, then hatched a plan to dispatch Charlotte in order to have sole possession of Dolores. He takes her across the country, living in cheap motels, and takes away Dolores's innocence and her childhood through his depraved acts. Humbert believes he is in love with her. All the while Dolores is planning her escape from him, which she eventually succeeds in doing, leading Humbert to track her for years with the full intention of killing the man who took her away from him. This book is extremely beautifully written. The prose is excellent and elegant, and not at all lewd despite its subject matter. The narrator is fully aware of his perversion and the fact ...

  The Boy in the Field By Margot Livesey While walking home from school one day, Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang discover the body of a boy laying in a field. He has been hurt and they call for help. Because of them his life is saved. Afterward, Matthew becomes obsessed with finding the person who did this to the boy (named Karel Lustig). He searches with Karel's brother. Zoe falls in love with an American college student while walking the streets of Oxford. Duncan, adopted into the Lang family, decides he wants to find his birth mother. And through it all they discover their father is having an affair and the woman is pregnant. Each in turn finds Karel and discusses his feelings about his ordeal and how they found him. He thanks them for saving him, yet wonders if maybe they shouldn't have. Throughout the autumn after saving Karel these three siblings struggle with the concept of evil in its various forms. They go through their own journeys of self-discovery. Their idyllic lives...

  Misery By Stephen King Misery is about Paul Sheldon, a historical romance author who runs his car off the road in the Colorado winter. He is rescued from death by Annie Wilkes, his number one fan. When Annie, a former RN who is nursing Paul back to health, discovers that he killed off her favorite character (Misery Chastain), she makes him write a new novel bringing her back to life. And she will stop at nothing to be sure he does just that. Annie is off the rails. She has personality disorders and depression, and a lifelong history of causing harm to those around her in both her personal and professional life. To Paul, Annie brings both the comfort and the pain. She gets him addicted to painkillers and uses them to keep him in her debt and dependent on her. When Paul starts getting out of the room he's been locked into, Annie's wrath becomes evident. Not that Paul can escape anyway. The house is locked tight, in the middle of nowhere, and Paul's legs are useless. Eventu...

  Go Tell It on the Mountain By James Baldwin John Grimes struggles with his father and himself in this novel about a family's relationships with one another and with their Pentecostal Church values. The book follows John's struggle with his father, who is not his biological father (unknown to him) and how his father (Gabriel) treats him poorly and abusively. John finds his way into his faith and hopes it will bring him closer to his father. Gabriel's backstory is explored, showing the moral hypocrisy of the church as Gabriel acts in ways that counter the moral values of the church. He refuses to see his wrongdoing, claiming that he has found forgiveness in God's eyes. Elizabeth's backstory shows her falling away from her religious upbringing when she meets and falls in love with John's biological father. When she meets Gabriel she is brought back to the church and her faith, with the promise that he will take care of her and John. The church is both a positive ...

 The Picture of Dorian Gray By Oscar Wilde   Artist Basil Hallward has painted a portrait of the beautiful young Dorian Gray, a young man everyone admires for his youth and vitality. While in the studio, Basil's friend Henry Wotton is introduced to Dorian who fascinates the young man with his wild and hedonistic ideas about life. Once the painting is finished, the three marvel at it and Dorian wishes that he would always look so young and beautiful, and that the picture would get old and ugly instead of him.  Over several years Wotton seems to corrupt Dorian, who begins to lead his own hedonistic lifestyle and causing the ruin of many men and women along the way. His friendship with Basil wanes as he spends more and more time with Wotton. As he is living this life, Dorian discovers that the painting is starting to have changes of expression and appears to be getting ugly and to have blood on its hands. This change begins to drive Dorian a little mad. He vows to lock the p...

  Precious Based on the novel Push By Sapphire Precious Jones is an overweight, illiterate, pregnant, sixteen-year-old high school freshman with HIV who has been living with abuse at the hands of her parents. She is an incest survivor from both parents, and also has a child from her father who impregnated her with the second. Though she is brought down by her parents and her welfare-state life, her weight, and the verbal abuse she receives every day from her peers, Precious has an innate desire to learn in this book she finds the way to do that. She is determined to get herself into a better situation for her unborn child and possibly for her other daughter ,who has Downs Syndrome and is in the care of her grandmother. After she is expelled from her school because she is pregnant, despite receiving praise form some of her teachers and getting good grades, Precious joins an alternative education program in order to bring her reading and writing skills up to par to be able to enter a...